Tag Archives: lower

If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

by JosefHueber Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Impeachmania peaked last week. After the House approved Speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit alleging executive overreach by President Barack Obama, Democrats pounced, blanketing the media and donors’ inboxes with dire warnings that Republicans would soon resort to impeachment. Boehner, for his part, dismissed the hysterics as a fundraising ploy. “It’s all a scam started by the Democrats at the White House,” he said last week, vowing that the House had no intention to begin impeachment hearings while he still held the speaker’s gavel. But Boehner’s control over his unruly tea-party-tinged caucus has proved tenuous time and again, and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the unofficial leader of the Impeach Obama Caucus, has floated a new (and no less quixotic) solution: If Boehner won’t let the GOP caucus impeach the president himself, Republicans should begin impeachment proceedings against members of Obama’s cabinet in his stead.

“I don’t think that John Boehner is going to bring about impeachment, which I understand, because what we really need is to remove Barack Obama from office, and the Senate has the power to remove the president, not the House,” Bachmann told activists on a call last Tuesday hosted by the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA. “The Senate is not going to remove him. So all we would do is effectively make the president a political martyr by impeaching him.” Instead, Bachmann suggested, the Senate might be more willing to take up articles of impeachment against the lower-level officials who follow Obama’s executive orders granting temporary reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants (why, exactly, Senate Democrats would be more amenable to this cause was left unclear). “For instance, I would nominate impeaching the head of Homeland Security who will execute the laws on the border,” she said, referring to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. “I think that we need to have a hearing, and we need to, if need be, bring about articles of impeachment and tell the president that if you issue these work permits, we are going to hold the person accountable who is going to execute your lawless law, and we will bring that person up for betrayal of public trust and we’ll impeach that official.”

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If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

by Adam Stossel Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

So what are Republicans in the House of Representatives up to these days? According to Danny Vinik, they just passed a bill that would reduce taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.

I know, I know: you’re shocked. But in a way, I think this whole episode is even worse than Vinik makes it sound.

Here’s the background: The child tax credit reduces your income tax by $1,000 for each child you have. It phases out for upper middle-income folks, but—and this is the key point—it phases out differently for singles and couples. The way the numbers sort out, it treats singles better than couples. This is the dreaded “marriage penalty,” which is bad because we want to encourage people to get married, not discourage them.

So what did House Republicans do? Naturally, they raised the phase-out threshold for married couples so that well-off couples would get a higher benefit. They didn’t have to do this, of course. They could have lowered the benefit for singles instead. Or they could have jiggled the numbers so that everyone got equal benefits but the overall result was revenue neutral.

But they didn’t. They chose the path that would increase the benefit—and thus lower taxes—for married couples making high incomes. The bill also indexes the credit to inflation, which helps only those with incomes high enough to claim the full credit. And it does nothing to make permanent a reduction in the earnings threshold that benefits poor working families. Here’s the net result:

If the House legislation became law, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that a couple making $160,000 a year would receive a new tax cut of $2,200. On the other hand, the expiring provisions of the CTC would cause a single mother with two kids making $14,500 to lose her full CTC, worth $1,725.

So inflation indexing, which is verboten when the subject is the minimum wage, is A-OK when it comes to high-income taxpayers. And eliminating the marriage penalty is also a good idea—but again, only for high-income couples. Which is crazy. I don’t really have a firm opinion on whether the government should be in the business of encouraging marriage, but if it is, surely it should focus its attention on the people who need encouragement in the first place. And that is very decidedly not the upper middle class, which continues to get married at the same rate as ever.

So we have a deficit-busting tax cut. It’s a cut only for the upper middle class. It’s indexed for inflation, even though we’re not allowed to index things like the minimum wage. And the poor are still scheduled for a tax increase in 2017 because this bill does nothing to stop it. It’s a real quad-fecta. I wonder what Paul Ryan thinks of all this?

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

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The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

by BobbieWhinham Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the Halbig case that struck down subsidies on federal Obamacare exchanges earlier today, one of the key issues was deference to agency interpretation of the law. Longstanding precedent holds that courts should generally defer to agency interpretations as long as they’re plausible. They don’t have to be perfect. They don’t even have to be the best possible interpretations. They merely have to make sense.

The DC circuit court decided that there really wasn’t any serious ambiguity in the law, and therefore no deference was due to the IRS’s interpretation that state and federal exchanges were meant to be treated the same. The dissent was scathing about this, since the record pretty clearly showed tons of ambiguity. So if and when this case makes it up to the Supreme Court, what’s going to happen? A lawyer buddy of mine is pessimistic:

Sadly, I think the Supreme Court will eagerly uphold the challenge because it gets to an issue that conservatives have generally despised: deference to administrative agencies’ interpretation of statutes.

It’s long been a fundamental principle in administrative law that an agency’s interpretation of a federal statute that they are charged with enforcing is entitled to judicial deference, unless such deference is unreasonable. Conservatives would prefer that courts not defer to the government because #biggovernment. Thus, they want to weaken the deference standard and Halbig gives them basically a two-fer. Or a three-fer since the agency interpreting the statute is the IRS: Take out Obamacare, knock back the deference standard, and punch the IRS. This invariably will help advance the conservatives’ legal goals because with a lower deference standard, their eccentric theories (such as on tax issues) have a better chance of surviving.

In normal times, the deference standard would likely be left intact because weakening it raises serious issues with government enforcement across all agencies, and courts are loath to send the country into a tailspin. But those days are apparently long past. Truly frightening times.

So what’s next? In breaking news, the Fourth Circuit court has just upheld the federal subsidies in Obamacare, ruling squarely on deference grounds—and disagreeing completely with the DC circuit opinion, which held that the legislative language in Obamacare was clear and plain. In fact, said the Fourth Circuit, the statute is ambiguous, and therefore the court owes deference to the IRS interpretation. This is good news for Obamacare, especially if today’s DC circuit decision by a three-judge panel is overturned by the full court, thus giving the government two appellate court wins. If that happens, it’s even possible that the Supreme Court would decline to hear an appeal and simply leave the lower court opinions in place.

But I’d say an eventual Supreme Court date still seems likely. There’s no telling if my friend’s read of the politico-legal climate among the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is correct, but I thought it was worth sharing.

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The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

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Should Democrats Boycott the Benghazi Committee?

by ElveraTaber Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Nancy Pelosi wants John Boehner’s select committee on Benghazi to have equal representation from Democrats and Republicans:

“If this review is to be fair, it must be truly bipartisan,” Pelosi said in a Tuesday morning statement. “The panel should be equally divided between Democrats and Republicans as is done on the House Ethics Committee. It should require that witnesses are called and interviewed, subpoenas are issued, and information is shared on a bipartisan basis. Only then could it be fair.”

….House Democrats have not yet committed to appointing members to the committee. Her call for the committee to be evenly split could set the stage for boycotting the panel if Republicans rebuff her suggestion.

Good luck with that. I’d say the appointment of Trey Gowdy—a tea party attack dog with a grand total of 40 months of seniority—to lead the committee is a pretty good indication of just how bipartisan Boehner wants this thing to be. In short, not even the teensiest, tiniest little bit bipartisan. This is going to be a made-for-Fox extravaganza, and that’s that.

So should Democrats just boycott the committee and let Republicans howl into the wilderness all by themselves? That’s a really hard question, isn’t it? My first instinct is to say yes: it’s obvious that Democrats will have no influence on the committee, and attending does little except provide it with a veneer of legitimacy.

On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to cherry-pick witnesses and testimony, and having someone there to cross-examine the Republicans’ pet conspiracy theorists might prevent more than a few bad news cycles. Then again, it might not. It’s not as if the reporters covering this stuff aren’t already well aware of the timelines of what really happened.

Decisions, decisions. I’m not sure that boycotting sets a good precedent, but if ever there was a committee that deserved it, this is the one. In the end, though, I’ll bet Democrats show up. Not only are they afraid of the possible damage from a committee run amok, but they’re probably loath to give up their chance for TV time. Brace yourselves.

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Should Democrats Boycott the Benghazi Committee?

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The Latest Benghazi Freakout In Ten Sentences

by DaniloPoirier Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by Judicial Watch, the White House released a memo related to Benghazi that was authored by Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication. The four-page memo, written a few days after the attacks, was designed to prep Susan Rice for her upcoming appearances on several Sunday talk shows. Among other things, it addressed the anti-American protests that had first sprung up in Egypt and then spread throughout the Middle East, including this line as one of the goals of her appearances:

To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.

Republicans say this is a “smoking gun” of a White House cover-up on Benghazi. But is it? Here are ten things you should know:

  1. First things first: this memo should have been released earlier, and conservatives are fully justified in asking why it took a FOIA request to finally shake it loose.
  2. That said, as an adviser for “strategic communication”—what the rest of us call spin—Ben Rhodes’ job is explicitly political, providing guidance on how to put the administration’s foreign policy actions in the best light.
  3. Nine hours before Rhodes sent his email, the CIA had provided its assessment of what caused the attacks in Benghazi: “We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US consulate and subsequently its annex.”
  4. The Cairo protests, in turn, were inspired by the YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims,” which is why Rhodes mentioned the video in his memo.
  5. As it happens, it turned out that there were no protests earlier in the day in Benghazi—but at the time, that was what the CIA believed.
  6. However, multiple sources—including McClatchy, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, and then deputy CIA director Michael Morell—have confirmed that anger toward the YouTube video did play a role in motivating the initial attacks.
  7. Multiple sources also confirm that that the Benghazi attacks were opportunistic—organized hastily to take advantage of the Cairo protests, not planned days or weeks ahead of time.
  8. Susan Rice, in all her Sunday show appearances, was properly cautious about the role of the video, the nature of the attacks, and the fact that everything she said was tentative and based on “the best information we have to date.”
  9. Like any administration, the Obama White House wanted to put the best face on its Middle East policy, and there’s no question that their public statements were designed to do just that.
  10. Nevertheless, the Republican theory that Obama was afraid to blame Benghazi on terrorism has never really made any sense; there’s simply never been any evidence of anything more than a fairly routine amount of spin in the aftermath of the attacks.

So: A “smoking gun”? “Cold, hard evidence” of an Obama cover-up? Just like Watergate? Hardly. Even George Will doesn’t believe that. The video really did play a role in the Cairo protests and then the Benghazi attacks, and there was never anything wrong with saying so. It’s inexplicable that Republicans think this memo proves anything more damning than that.

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The Latest Benghazi Freakout In Ten Sentences

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Guns May Soon Be Everywhere in Georgia

by YettaKKKvah Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Soon gun owners in the state of Georgia may be allowed to pack heat almost anywhere—including K-12 schools, bars, churches, government buildings, and airports. The “Safe Carry Protection Act” (HB 875) would also expand Georgia’s Stand Your Ground statute, the controversial law made famous by the Trayvon Martin killing, which allows armed citizens to defend themselves with deadly force if they believe they are faced with serious physical harm.

The bill could pass as soon as next week, before the current legislative session ends on March 20. It is the latest effort in the battle over gun laws that continues to rage in statehouses around the country. It is perhaps also the most extreme yet. “Of all the bills pending right now in state legislatures, this is the most sweeping and most dangerous,” Laura Cutiletta, a staff attorney with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told PolitiFact. Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun-reform advocacy group founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she was shot in the head, has deemed it the “guns everywhere” bill. For its part, the National Rifle Association recently called HB 875 “the most comprehensive pro-gun reform legislation introduced in recent state history.”

In addition to overturning current state laws and dramatically rolling back concealed-carry restrictions, HB 875 would loosen other gun regulations in the state. The law would:

Remove the fingerprinting requirement for gun license renewals
Prohibit the state from keeping a gun license database
Tighten the state’s preemption statute, which restricts local governments from passing gun laws that conflict with state laws
Repeal the state licensing requirement for firearms dealers (requiring only a federal firearms license)
Expand gun owner rights in a declared state of emergency by prohibiting government authorities from seizing, registering, or otherwise limiting the carrying of guns in any way permitted by law before the emergency was declared
Limit the governor’s emergency powers by repealing the ability to regulate the sale of firearms during a declared state of emergency
Lower the age to obtain a concealed carry license from 21 to 18 for active-duty military and honorably discharged veterans who’ve completed basic training
Prohibit detaining someone for the sole purpose of checking whether they have a gun license

The sweeping bill would also expand the state’s Stand your Ground law into an “absolute” defense for the use of deadly force in self-protection. “Defense of self or others,” the bills reads “shall be an absolute defense to any violation under this part.” In its current wording, the bill would even allow individuals who possess a gun illegally—convicted felons, for example—to still claim a Stand Your Ground defense.

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Guns May Soon Be Everywhere in Georgia

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Quote of the Day: Tax Reform Is Dead On Arrival

by WendellFarncomb Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, commenting on his House colleague Dave Camp’s tax reform bill:

I think we will not be able to finish the job, regretfully. I don’t see how we can.

And….that’s a wrap, folks. Tax reform is officially a dead letter before poor old Dave Camp even had a chance to unveil his plan.

Naturally, McConnell blames this sad state of affairs on Democrats, because what else would he do? But I think everyone understands the real truth here: Republicans have no stomach for debating tax reform in an election year. Why? For the usual reason: everyone loves lower rates, but no one has the guts to so much as discuss the tax breaks they’d close to make up for the lower rates. Paul Ryan refuses to do this on an annual basis when he releases his latest budget roadmap. Mitt Romney famously tap danced around the subject for months in 2012. No one wanted to open this can of worms during either the fiscal cliff negotiations or any of the sequester standoffs.

Nothing has changed since then. If you talk about the mortgage interest deduction, you piss off millions of homeowners. If you talk about the carried interest loophole, you piss off billions of dollars worth of hedge fund managers. If you talk about the charitable deduction, every church in America will go ballistic. If you talk about 401(k)s, you piss off old people. If you talk about the exclusion of healthcare benefits from taxation, you piss off every middle-class worker in America. If you talk about capital gains rates, you might as well just kiss off your membership in the conservative movement.

“Broadening the base” sounds great when you use bloodless terms like “broadening the base.” But when you translate that into actual tax deductions you want to get rid of, it doesn’t sound so great at all. Mitch McConnell knows this perfectly well, and he wants this particular Pandora’s Box to stay well and truly sealed for at least the next eight months. His mama didn’t raise no fools.

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Quote of the Day: Tax Reform Is Dead On Arrival

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Does Winning $800 Really Make You More Right Wing?

by Danielzhg Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few days ago a pair of British researchers released a paper that presented a startling conclusion: winning the lottery makes you more conservative. Apparently, having money, even if it’s just money you won randomly, pushes you to the right.

This got a lot of attention, and last night I finally got around to reading a summary of the paper. I was struck by the actual results, which nobody had highlighted. You can see it in the chart on the right, which shows the percentage of people who switched from supporting the Labor Party to supporting the Conservative Party. It’s about 13 percent for non-winners, 14 percent for small winners, and 17 percent for winners of £500 or more.

And….I dunno. Aside from technical arguments about sample size, appropriate statistics, robustness, and so forth, I just have to say that this seems unlikely. Even for people with modest incomes, a lottery win of $800 just can’t be that big a deal. I know that four percentage points isn’t really that large, but even four percentage points seems like an implausibly large effect for a one-time windfall of a few hundred dollars.

At first, I thought I had a clever explanation for this: perhaps being taxed on lottery winnings pushes people a bit to the right. It’s a big bite all at once, and it’s the kind of thing that often strikes people as unfair. But no. It turns out that lottery winnings are tax-free in Britain. So that’s not it.

Bottom line: the results of this study are intuitively appealing, since having money is pretty obviously associated with being more conservative. But I have a hard time believing this result anyway. I’d sure like to see a follow-up in some other country before I take it too seriously.

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Does Winning $800 Really Make You More Right Wing?

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The Right to Vote Is Too Important to Be Denied to Ex-Felons

by Tamera4915 Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Roger Clegg is seriously unhappy about Eric Holder’s call for the restoration of voting rights to felons who have served their sentences:

He conveniently ignores the reason for felon disenfranchisement, namely that if you aren’t willing to follow the law, then you can hardly claim a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote….The right to vote can be restored, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis, once a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf. The high recidivism rates that Mr. Holder acknowledges in his speech just show why that new leaf cannot be presumed simply because someone has walked out of prison; he’ll probably be walking back in, alas. A better approach to the re-integration that Mr. Holder wants is to wait some period of time, review the felon’s record and, if he has shown he is now a positive part of his community, then have a formal ceremony — rather like a naturalization ceremony — in which his rights are restored.

Let’s concede the obvious up front: Released felons are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans, so there’s an obvious partisan motivation on both sides of this debate.

That said, I favor restoring voting rights to felons, and I’m willing to meet Clegg halfway. I’d be OK with waiting some reasonable period of time1 before restoring voting rights, but I think restoration should be the default after that time has elapsed. That is, after, say, five years, you automatically get your voting rights back unless there’s some specific reason you don’t qualify. And those reasons should be very clear and spelled out via statute.

My position here is based on a simple—perhaps simplistic—view of political freedom. I believe that liberal democracies require three minimum rules of law: free speech, the right to a fair trial, and universal suffrage. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t mean that nothing else is important.2 But I do mean that if you have these three things, then the odds are very strong that you qualify as a free country. Countries that enforce these rights differ considerably on a wide variety of other metrics and still strike us as mostly free. But I can’t think of a country that fails on any of them that we’d consider mostly free.

In other words, I believe the right to vote is on the same level as free speech and fair trials. And no one suggests that released felons should be denied either of those. In fact, they can’t be, because those rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Voting would be on that list too if it weren’t for an accident of history: namely that we adopted democracy a long time ago, when the mere fact of voting at all was a revolutionary idea, let alone the idea of letting everyone vote. But that accident doesn’t make the right to vote any less important.

A probationary period of some kind is probably reasonable. But once you’re released from prison and you’ve finished your parole, you’re assumed to have paid your debt to society. That means you’re innocent until proven guilty, and competent to protect your political interests in the voting booth unless proven otherwise. No free society should assume anything different.3

1What’s reasonable? Let’s just leave that for another day, OK?

2No, really, I mean that. There’s other important stuff. Honest. But these are the big three. Even freedom of religion can vary a lot within liberal democracies, with a minimum floor set by the fact that most religious expression is protected as free speech. Other important rights—including property rights—can largely be protected as long as majorities can freely express their views and freely elect representatives who agree with them.

3This is doubly true in a country like ours, where incarceration is so rampant and so racially unbalanced.

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The Right to Vote Is Too Important to Be Denied to Ex-Felons

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Figure Skating Is Hopelessly Corrupt

by PEACarinzhpby Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Which sport is more corrupt, ski jumping or figure skating? Normally, my rule of thumb is that the higher up the world ladder you go (local vs. national vs. international) the more corrupt a sport becomes. Thus, I would have guessed that a sport in which the international federation chooses judges would be more corrupt than one in which national federations choose judges. But no! Eric Zitzewitz has compared two sports and finds just the opposite:

Ski jumping has its international federation select the judges for competitions like the Olympics, and I find that they select the least biased judges. Figure skating lets its national federations select the judges, and my research showed that they select the most biased judges.

This creates different incentives for judges. Ski jumping judges display less nationalism in lower-level competitions — it appears they keep their nationalism under wraps in less important contests to avoid missing their chance at judging the Olympics. Figure skating judges are actually more biased in the lesser contests; they may actually be more biased than they would like to be due to pressure from their federations.

It turns out that ski jumping judges are biased, but the other judges are mostly biased in the other direction, so everything ends up even. Having an American judge doesn’t help American jumpers. Figure skating is just the opposite. Not only are national judges biased, the other judges all go along. If an American judge is on the panel, American skaters get higher marks from the American judge and also get higher marks from all the other judges:

Of all these results, I am most intrigued by the contrast between the ski jumping judges undoing each other’s biases and the figure skating judges reinforcing them. When we make decisions in a group at work, we often encounter individuals with strong biases — say to hire a particular type of job candidate. When we do, we have a choice. We can act like a ski jumping judge, and resist the bias, in an effort to keep things fair. Or we can act like a figure skating judge and say “hiring this guy really seems important to Joe, I wonder what he’ll give me in return if I go along.” We have probably all seen examples of both in our lives.

There’s a small mountain of other evidence that figure skating is hopelessly corrupt, and has aggressively protected that corruption ever since the judging scandals of 1998 and 2002. Zitzewitz has the evidence if you read his entire post.

But corruption can only go so far. That 15-year-old Russian figure skater, Julia Lipnitskaia, is so good that even I could tell how good she was when she skated in the team competition. All the corruption in the world couldn’t have robbed her of the top score.

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Figure Skating Is Hopelessly Corrupt

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